We share our thoughts and views on technology and what we are cooking up
Blog
Max G. Faraday
Jul 6, 2021 - 1 min read
Vision
The internet in the current state is not entirely what it was conceived to be. We have some huge players on the web and that is a product of market forces and the complexity of the internet itself. I was that guy that had his own stack of 1U VA-Linux boxes in his living room humming day and night, with a T1 line dropped to my house in 1997. I ran my own class C IP address, DNS, SMTP mail server, web server, music streaming server. I FTP'ed my files to my machines and hosted my friends' "home pages". I ran all the services. I waited until I pretty much had to succumb and get a gmail account because I had moved across the country and wasn't able to take my digital world with me. I was vexed because now I had to use a service for something that I can and had been doing myself.
In the first start up I was in, we did everything. I really mean everything! We made the servers, we put the OS on them, we wrote our custom software suite and then, we literally rolled them out to our customers. We set up networks, configured ISDN lines and had the hair brained idea of hosting software at our location - off-site from our clients so that they could outsource their IT and software. Hmmmm, imagine that.
The truth is that capitalism came in and saw the opportunity to give people "the internet" and wrap it up in an more palatable form factor. I was fine with firing up emacs and reading terminals filled with scrolling information, but that wasn't the case for the general, larger population. Companies sprung up, wrapping services in user friendly interfaces and allowing users to access access through your browser. None of this is news, we know this story. However, something exciting is happening...
Today, the general population is more savvy and familiar with the internet.
The 6th Column Project, LLC 2021